Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of multimedia computing devices, and more particularly to the field of wireless multimedia computing devices requiring low latency.
Discussion of the State of the Art
It is commonplace to stream various multimedia content to one or more devices from a single computing device. For example, a “smart TV” may operate LINUX™ (or a variant of LINUX™ such as ANDROID™) and may display high-definition video on the smart TV and stream various channels of audio to audio playback devices (some on the Smart TV and some separate from it). Or, a user of a mobile device may wish to watch a video on the device while having the audio streamed to and played back from a plurality of wireless speakers. In another example, a media computing device may operate using an operating system such as ANDROID™ but has no built-in user interface; rather, it serves virtual screens to mobile devices, each of which has a full operating system user interface that can interact wirelessly with the media computing device (which may be, for example, an HDMI “stick” that plugs into an HDMI port of a television).
In all of these use cases, low latency networking is a critical success factor. Even slight latency can cause synchronization problems, poor multimedia playback due to jitter or irregular playback speeds, and the like. For demanding low-latency applications where wireless networking is used, any means of reducing the latency brings immediate user-sensible benefits.
What is needed, then, is a means for providing reliable, very low-latency wireless networking, particularly for use with mobile devices, smart TVs, and wireless speakers.